The well-publicized growth in the use of the Internet generally has been paralleled by an equivalent growth in the number of publishers creating text and graphical content for the Internet. Unlike past mass mediums such as that of television, radio, and newspaper where it can be cost prohibitive to reach large numbers of consumers, the Internet has enabled any publisher to deliver content anywhere in the world at virtually no cost. This radical shift in the economics of text and graphical publishing resulted in tens of millions of websites. While a great deal of any specific content has limited application to a wide-range of the population, the key is that it has become highly cost-effective to create and publish content with vertical or specialized focus, and it is this factor that has made the Internet such a powerful and compelling medium for consumers. Rather than sit idly in front of a broadcast, mass-medium television, consumers sit at their personal computers and query a search engine to find the topics that interest them, no matter how arcane or specialized those topics might be.
More recently, we have witnessed the slow but steady growth of commercial video services on the Internet. In particular, the range and number of video publishers offering fee-based and ad-supported streaming video services has begun to grow. The massive investment telecommunications companies made in the last several years in connectivity and broadband capability has begun to pay off. Broadband penetration has reached a critical mass where the economics of broadband delivery and access are now feasible. At the same time, the increasing sophistication of digital editing, compression and encoding technologies, and the limitations of ordinary cable and broadcast distribution, has set the stage for an explosive growth in the creation of, and demand for, the delivery of video and other digital content over the Internet.
A broad range of TV brands and cable networks have begun to expand their use of the Internet with advertising and subscription supported streaming products. Largely these efforts have been experimental, and in terms of the overall market of mainstream networks, this represents a tiny percentage of the available suppliers. Additionally, there already exists a wave of next-tier providers and producers who currently do not have carriage on cable or satellite who will look to this new open distribution channel as a means to monetize their media.
As the economics and enabling technologies of video distribution on the Internet progresses, the creation of video and other digital content for Internet delivery will experience a similar growth as was seen previously in the creation of specialized text and graphical content. Serving these needs is a primary purpose of the Invention.